TOPICS:

EVENT ANGLE:

Premium Research

You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

While the details were not fully divulged to the media, one thing is crystal clear—the new version of the web-based Kindle is not yet for sale, but may be available in the market early January of 2011. In a statement from Allen Weiner, a research analyst at Gartner predicted: “It could get an official launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January. The Kindle for the Web concept first surfaced about a month ago and seemed like a “natural evolution” of Amazon’s e-book strategy.”

The launch of a web version of the Kindle means anyone with a computer will be able to buy and download ebooks. This is only an upgrade since Amazon already had Kindle for the web. Kindle works under the same principle as Google’s ebooks, and aims to be as competitive as possible in this booming market. How successful it is, however, is a decision left to the readers and independent book sellers—whose platform they want to back up. As with similar markets with varied outlets and approaches, however, we’re sure to see services that encompass all available platforms for marketing and monetization in the publishing industry.

The reason experts note as a cause for this sudden move is for Amazon to keep up with Google, though Google’s launch of its e-bookstore yesterday was, in a sense, a way for the search engine giant to catch up with Amazon, Apple and the like. Nevertheless, Google could pose a real threat to Amazon. Why? Google has a formidable name and can support many more devices. Moreover, Google is looking into developing and supporting PDF and ePub, while tapping into the myriad of resources it’s been working with on other digital text initiatives.

The competition heats up as more and more people get hooked to eReading and its capabilities. Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader with colour touchscreen was also launched recently in time for the holidays and gift giving season. This e-reader specifically runs under Google’s Android operating system and can be used to view digital books, newspapers, magazines and even children’s books.